Slave drive for TP600

[Olde Man]

I have the fitting that allows me to use a 2nd HD as a slave drive. I have an IBM HD "Travelstar" HD. The discription on the HD gives the jumper settings for slave etc. Only thing, where do the jumpers go? There seems to be no room on the connector pins for the type of jumpers I have. It surely would take a very tiny jumper to work there.

Yet, I don't see any other connectors.

Any ideas?

The current setting causes the D drive to move to E, the F drive appears on the slave, but the other partition (G?) does not appear at all.

[pkiff]

I have the fitting that allows me to use a 2nd HD as a slave drive. I have an IBM HD "Travelstar" HD. The discription on the HD gives the jumper settings for slave etc. Only thing, where do the jumpers go? There seems to be no room on the connector pins for the type of jumpers I have. It surely would take a very tiny jumper to work there.

You probably have jumpers from a 3.5" desktop drive. The jumpers for a laptop drive are smaller, but they fit exactly over top of the pins.

Normally, however, you shouldn't need any jumpers when adding a Travelstar disk to your Thinkpad using the Second HDD Adapter. The best way to install a laptop drive is to leave things at "cable select", which should be the default, I think. It is possible that your Thinkpad may even over-ride or ignore whatever setting other than "cable select" is enabled by jumpers on the drive.

The current setting causes the D drive to move to E, the F drive appears on the slave, but the other partition (G?) does not appear at all.

Drive letters will change depending on whether you have other drives installed, whether partitions are "primary" or "extended", and whether or not you are docked in a docking station. I'm not clear on what isn't working the way it should. You seem to be missing a partition that you think is there. Is that the only problem other than which letters get used for which drives? If so, then double-check that the partition is formatted.

Later versions of Windows provide additional Disk Management options that can give you more information about how your system "sees" the drive. What is your OS?

Phil.

[Olde Man]

OK, after getting neckdeep in GOOGLE, I finally determined the location of the jumper for the 'slave'. Fudged it with very thin copper wire, wound several times.

Result: Very slow bootup (I thought I had killed it) and no recognition of the new HD.

So....

There is a deliberate jumper setting for 'Cable select'. No jumpers=Master which is what it is on now.

OS is Win98SE.

The reason I think there is still a partition there (there was one earlier) is that only half of the drive is recongized. But I have never been able to reach the other half to format it. And fDisk just kind of sits there and stares at it complaining about the wrong parameter.

Actually, my only problem is reaching only half the drive. As I use it for backup only, I can live with the odd lettering.

Thanks for the response.

[pkiff]

There is a deliberate jumper setting for 'Cable select'. No jumpers=Master which is what it is on now.

I don't think your issue comes from the jumpers. I'm pretty sure that the Thinkpad 600 series will automatically treat an HDD in a second HDD adapter as a slave, regardless of what jumpers you try to enable. You control which drive you boot from via the BIOS boot menu, not via jumpers on the drives.

fDisk just kind of sits there and stares at it complaining about the wrong parameter.

You mean you can't run fdisk? That suggests a problem. You should be able to run it, at least. Are you using any paramters or is it complaining about parameters even though you aren't using any? On your Win98SE machine, in a DOS box at a command prompt, you should be able to type fdisk and hit <Return> and get a menu of options. Does that not work?

[Olde Man]

Finally got fdisk to work. I was using the wrong command. So....

At the "change current fixed disk drive."

Disk 1 C:
E: Volumes of C+E total what is usually C+D

Disk 2 D:
F: Voumes D+F total what should be E+F
D shows the correct volume but if you actually go into D, there is nothing there. The system does not recognize D. The D volume is now E.

PARTITION INFO DRIVE 2 (Not all info shown)

Partition Status Type System
D: 1 A Pri. MOS FAT 16 (Huh?)
2 Ext. MOS

And that's all I have right now. Any suggestions?

[Olde Man]

Let's try that second part again.

PARTITION INFO DRIVE 2

PARTITION ----STATUS -------TYPE -------SYSTEM

D:--1--------------A --------- Pri MOS------FAT 16 (HUH?)
---- 2 -------------------------Ext MOS

[pkiff]

Can you check the spelling for me there? When you say "Pri MOS" you mean "Pri DOS", right?

Assuming yes, then everything looks normal to me. You've just got to figure out how to make it all work.

First off, your drive letters are appearing exactly as they should. Different operating systems do different things, but under Windows 98, your first available drive letter will be assigned to the first disk's "primary" partition. That is your drive C. Your next available drive letter (D) will be assigned to the next "primary" partition on the next available disk, if it exists. That is your drive D. Then it will go back to your first disk and start assigning remaining letters to "extended" partitions. That is E. Then it goes to the next disk in line and does the same thing. That is F. Your drive letters appear to be assigned the way they should and there is nothing wrong with them. If you don't want your new disk to be assigned drive letter D, then you can use a DOS utility to change the drive letter at boot-time (I personally use the freeware Letter Assigner version 1.2.0), or you can change it so that it is not a "primary" partition, but an "extended" partition instead.

Next, I'm not clear on what part of the partition info is incorrect. Is there a partition on the disk that is not showing up via fdisk? Or is it that you don't understand where the various partitions came from or how to access them?

Phil.

[Olde Man]

DOS was correct, for some reason I read MOS. As I vividly remember the Brits chasing the Bismarck, you are not dealing with a Spring Chicken here. Ms-Dos was fun in da olde days, everything after that has been increasing aggravation.

Anyway, based on your explanation of why the partitions were ID'd the way they were, I was able to partition my 2nd drive into one partition so that now I can use the entire disk. Before that I didn't really know what I was looking at.

Thanks again for your time.

[pkiff]

As I vividly remember the Brits chasing the Bismarck, you are not dealing with a Spring Chicken here. Ms-Dos was fun in da olde days, everything after that has been increasing aggravation.

Ha ha, well I guessed that might be the case from your Olde Man moniker! Glad you've sorted out the issue.

Phil.